Yes, I considered DIY, but then I reasoned that it would look like a piece of bent Romex and gave up on the idea.

I went on to consider a piece of coat hanger, paper clips, a gum wrapper, a bent nail, and lastly a piece of garden twine. These worked (to varying degrees), but they still didn't provide the professional look that I wanted, so I gave up on them as well.

it would be better to use XLR cables terminated on one side with a standard male plug, on the other side a cinch plug where you connect 1 and 3 to ground.
This way you have the advantage that the noise/distortion added by the cable is cancelled out.